1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a sheet sorting apparatus used with an image printing apparatus such as a copying machine.
2. Description of Prior Art
A sheet sorting device normally employs an array of trays. Trays of some conventional sorters are fixed. Comparatively complicated sheet conveying and distribution mechanisms are required with sorters having fixed trays. Such sorters are, therefore, generally bulky and costly. The complexity of the mechanism also tends to cause a sheet jamming.
For the past years, efforts have been made in the industry to make sheet sorters simpler in construction, more compact in size, thus lower in cost.
An ordinary conventional compact sheet sorting device of today has a plurality of vertically and slantly stacked trays for sorting and holding copy sheets. The trays are pivotingly vertically displaced by a set of cams in order to provide a wide open sheet discharge zone. The levels of the tray shifting cams and the sheet discharge zone of such a conventional compact sheet sorting device is normally fixed. The level of a sheet feeding mechanism attached to such a compact sorter is also normally fixed. An ordinary sheet feeding mechanism of a compact sorter includes a sheet inlet section for accepting sheets from the host sheet supplying 5 unit and possibly a sheet conveying mechanism for conveying the sheets to the discharge zone of the sorter. In a compact sorter having a fixed level sheet discharge zone the sorter has to provide an enough space for all of the trays, each of which may hold copy sheets to a full capacity, in each of the areas above and below the discharge zone. In other words, there is always a substantial idle space above and/or below the sheet discharge zone. This unavoidably increases the height of such a compact sorter.
Furthermore, a sorter having a fixed level sheet inlet section is not commonly adaptable to multiple kinds of host sheet supplying units with various levels of sheet outlets.